Depends. VMWare workstation is faster than VPC for just about everything (running OS's, snapshots, pausing/unpausing, etc). The snapshot and cloning systems in VMWare workstation are much better than VPC's. VMWare also has some nice niche features, like:

- (experimental but very good) 3D/DirectX Support.
- Virtual networking is much more advanced in VMWare workstation
- More "generic" hardware so it tends to work better with non-MS OS's
- More advanced virtual disks (supports IDE and SCSI guest HD's, disks can be set independent of snapshots, etc)
- USB Support
- Supports 64 bit guests on 32 bit (OS) hosts with 64bit processors*
- Support for up to 2 guest CPU's in SMP hosts
- Available for Windows, Linux, and soon OS X (Will probably be announced for beta at VMWorld next month)

That said, if you only use it occasionally then VPC is probably just fine. You can download a 30-day eval of workstation to try it out, so go take it for a spin.

I've used both and I prefer VMWare workstation. I use it both at work and at home every day. I can also say that VMWare is one of the few software companies I've seen that can really deliver on their promises and lives up to their marketing hype. I wish more software companies could do that.

*What I mean by this is this. Let's say your PC is configured like this:

AMD Opteron
Windows XP Pro 32-bit

You can still run, say, Windows XP/2003 64 bit or 64 bit Linux as a Guest OS in VMWare. You can also go the other way around, running 32 bit guests on a 64 bit host. There are some restrictions on the processors that is supported, so if you really want that functionality, test it with the eval first.

If you are running multiple enviros at the same time you need VMWare server I think....but VPC is faster if you are running just one.

Click to expand...

No, VMWare Workstation and Server both support running multiple VM's at the same time. Workstation's features are more geared to using it in a development environment than server, which is really geared to run VM's as test machines. Workstation, for example, supports multiple snapshots for a VM, so you can roll back changes more granularly. It also supports teaming, where you can tie a set of VM's together so they all start at the same time, etc.

edit: VPC also supports it, but it is definitely not faster than Workstation no matter how many are running.